Ari Boulogne, whose body was found this night at the age of 60, had been struggling for a long time to be recognized by the person he thought was his biological father, Alain Delon. He also fought a battle against addiction to hard drugs. This fight started at a young age, when he began to use heroin with his mother, the singer Nico. She was a muse of Andy Warhol and a member of the cult band The Velvet Underground, and was known for her consumption of many illicit substances. When Ari, who had been raised mainly by Alain Delon’s mother and stepfather, eventually found her at 16, she quickly led him to the same path. The two became inseparable and consumed together until Nico’s death in 1988 in a bicycle accident. Ari Boulogne, however, did not remember this decade of his life with bad memories, quite the contrary: in an interview with the JDD 5 years ago, he said “For me, she was a very good mother. She gave me everything. Even drugs, I lived it to the fullest with her without it being a problem. From my 16th year until the end, we shared the drugs, the same syringe. It was a way of being together”. Despite this, his dependency never really left him: after the singer’s death, he went through detoxification treatments, and seemed to have gotten out of it in the mid-90s, but according to his neighbors, he had unfortunately fallen back into his old habits. Drugs that marked his life, and may have been responsible for his death (an autopsy is currently underway). However, this did not change the image Ari Boulogne had of his mother, whom he accompanied all over the world. He said of her “Until the last moments of her life, she was flamboyant. She was not unhealthy. She had a crazy, dry and acidic humor, with a great sense of irony. She was a rock’n’roll woman, who took the stage like a lioness”. A beautiful tribute to a man who has lived a life of highs and lows, Ari Boulogne’s filiation struggle and his addiction to drugs have been two battles he fought throughout his life.
